A market survey has been performed of commercially available hydrogen safety sensors, resulting in a total sample size of 53 sensors from 21 manufacturers. The technical specifications, as provided by the manufacturer, have been collated and are displayed herein as a function of sensor working principle. These specifications comprise measuring range, response and recovery times, ambient temperature, pressure and relative humidity, power consumption and lifetime. These are then compared against known performance targets for both automotive and stationary applications in order to establish in how far current technology satisfies current requirements of sensor end users. Gaps in the performance of hydrogen sensing technologies are thus identified and areas recommended for future research and development.
Current standards governing the design, qualification and in-service inspection of carbon fibre composite cylinders do not facilitate to optimise cylinder design. The requirements have been adapted from standards for metallic cylinders and cannot easily quantify the degradation processes in composite materials. In this article, the results of hydraulic and hydrogen pressure cycle life tests performed on composite reinforced tanks with a metal liner (type 3) and with a high density polymer liner (type 4) are shown. Moreover, the degradation measured by means of residual strength of the tanks after the cycling tests have been compared. It has been found that the most critical aging for metal based composite cylinder is the gaseous cycling while type 4 designs seem to be more sensitive to hydraulic cycling at high temperature.